6 ms·
Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
by bluetwo 6y ago
Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
- sn41 6y agoIt's disturbing that we are being told to learn to live with the virus when there is such a high risk of contraction.
- CyberDildonics 6y agoAs opposed to what exactly?
- fennecfoxen 6y agoInsofar as you are being told this, the reason you are being told is the high risk of contraction.
- ekianjo 6y agoHigh risk but most infected have close to no symptoms which is nothing like AIDS which used to be a death sentence.
- ImaCake 6y agoBut even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoAnd if enough people start dying the disease overwhelms public everything. In the UK, some schools are refusing to reopen and some people are refusing to return to work in spite of government orders.
- ImaCake 6y agoIndeed, mass panic is an under appreciated risk in the discourse in some countries. We may have the misfortune of discovering just what that looks like in the coming months.
- acqq 6y ago> most infected have close to no symptoms Only most of recently infected have no symptoms, whereas most of infected do develop symptoms, but typically after they already transmitted the illness to other people. According to what it is currently known, from all infected around 80% do eventually develop some symptoms, up to 10% need hospital, up to 5% need intensive care and around 1% of all infected eventually die. That is when observed across all age groups, among the older it's much worse. And as soon as the health system can't cope the percentages of dead increase rapidly to even higher values -- i.e. those that need hospital need it because half of them will need intensive care (and nobody knows before it's critical who), those that need intensive care need it because most of them will need oxygen in some form and half of these will need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_intubation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_intubation That's why it's undesired to have non-functioning health system, and to avoid overwhelming the existing health systems.
- koheripbal 6y agoThat's not accurate. "mild cases" is not the same as "no symptoms".
- ekianjo 6y agoRead again: "close to no symptoms"
- dorchadas 6y agoYet we still have biology teachers the school I work at asking why we shut down for Corona/Covid and not HIV/Aids. He's a fucking biology teacher, and he refuses to see the difference because he wants his precious soccer team to play this year. It's so damn frustrating, especially knowing that nothing will happen to him because he's a coach.
- neilwilson 6y agoNow do the comparison with the 1950/51 Asian flu pandemic, and ask the same question. It's an area under the graph thing.
- drewbug01 6y agoWhich doesn't really mean that HIV/AIDS is not dangerous, but rather it underscores how much more dangerous CoViD really is. I truly hope we manage a better response than the AIDS crisis, because a similar response to COVID-19 would be incredibly devastating.
- ImaCake 6y agoI wonder what HIV would have done if it hit before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex. I think it could have brought civilization to it's knees.
- drewbug01 6y agoMaybe? I’m not sure that prophylactics really would be the deciding factor. Condoms are older than you might think, but on the other hand usage rates are still relatively low. And humanity keeps bouncing back from things: for example, the plague (multiple times!) I think the relatively long incubation time is probably what would have made it especially bad if it had taken hold earlier - say, in the 1800s when our understanding would have been limited and our ability to track it worse. It might have been much, much worse then.
- blfr 6y agoBefore mass adoption of protective equipment for sex people had the social technology to deal with it: monogamy.
- drewbug01 6y agoAlas, people have been promiscuous for all eternity. Even “monogamous” people cheat.
- koheripbal 6y agoNot really because penis / vaginal sex still had a low risk of transmission. That's why it erupted in the gay community first.
- 77pt77 6y agoOr put it like this. In NY alone there have been 23K deaths due to covid 19. 911 had about 3K dead. This was over 7 911 events in a matter of 3 months. Nationally it's about 33 911s in 3 months.
- Gibbon1 6y agoI read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that was bitching that the government was spending way too much money on AID's research instead of important things like heart disease. I read that, looked at their statistics and backed out an estimate of number of years of life lost for AID and Heart disease. And yeah AID's was a really big deal unless you were a sociopathic old white male editor at the WSJ. Reading what the Wall Street Journal thinks about SARS-COV2 shows they haven't changed a bit in 35 years.
- slavik81 6y agoI'm not sure that's a useful comparison. Without treatment, HIV takes an average of 8–10 years to kill a person, but it has a >90% fatality rate. You are comparing a sprinter to a marathon runner. It's hard to do the comparison justice using just one statistic.
- DC-3 6y agoAIDS killed healthy young men. The same is not true of COVID.
- KoftaBob 6y agoI wouldn’t compare those two viruses directly. HIV is sexually transmitted, whereas COVID is spread through exhaled water droplets. Think about how often the average person has sex vs how often they’re around tons of strangers who are exhaling, coughing, etc. Not to mention it takes quite some time for someone to die from an opportunistic infection as a result of being immunocompromised from AIDS.